Cohesity, a recognised leader in next-generation data management, is making bold moves to cement its position. Speaking with CRO, Kit Beall who described his time at the organisation as being “…with a much smaller Cohesity and then a much bigger Cohesity last year,” it is clear that Cohesity’s USD7 billion acquisition of Veritas not only meant the consolidation of a fragmented industry.
Critical mass through strategic acquisition
The Veritas acquisition significantly expanded Cohesity’s customer base to over 13,000 organisations in more than 160 countries. This has positioned Cohesity as a top player in the data protection market, and one that boasts the largest engineering team in the sector.
Kit reiterated, “We now have the largest engineering team of any company in the data protection space that allows us to capture opportunities with more velocity… it’s really enabling us to focus our business now on not just data protection, but data security and increasingly on data insights.”
The third component that the acquisition has enabled for Cohesity is scale to take on larger partnerships, for example with Semperis, a cybersecurity firm specialising in identity-driven protection and Active Directory recovery.
“So, we were actually able to expand and deepen some of these partnerships that in the past we were not quite at the critical mass to be able to cover,” he said.
Recognising that Active Directory is both ubiquitous and a frequent target in cyber attacks, Cohesity now offers fully automated restoration solutions, mitigating one of the most complex challenges in post-incident recovery for global enterprises. This partnership allows clients to deploy industry-leading identity security quickly and seamlessly as part of their broader data protection strategies.
Engineering resource
Access to the largest engineering resource in the data protection space means a few significant things for Cohesity. “We (already) like to say we are the leader in AI-powered data security, it’s sort of our tagline.”
Kit explained Cohesity is now able to support a breadth of modern workloads and mission-critical workloads thanks to Veritas’s range of historical connectors that support computing platforms from 15 to 30 years ago.
“The second thing is (engineering resource) lets us protect that broad set of capabilities or workloads with our increasing set of security capabilities and automation.”
Cohesity has automated a very significant number of steps for backup and recovery processes.
“This is a big part of being resilient now… the ability to automate recovery and practice it on a regular basis. We now have that automation across the whole platform.”
Cohesity’s strategy, especially since introducing agentic AI last April, has been to automate wherever possible – deploying AI to enhance product effectiveness, security, and overall capability. RecoveryAgent was announced as Cohesity’s first product to leverage agentic AI, specifically designed to automate and accelerate cyber recovery workflows for customers.
The company also runs parallel efforts to equip and educate customers and partners, ensuring they’re able to fully leverage these advanced tools within their environments.
Partners are the scaling engine for Cohesity and we are reliant on them.
Kit Beall
Cohesity’s innovation extends to generative AI with the launch of Gaia – an advanced AI solution designed to help enterprises unlock the value of unstructured data such as documents and PDFs. This powerful tool is further amplified through Cohesity’s strategic partnership with Nvidia – a relationship that Kit called “special.”
A data protection foundation – the last line of defense in a security breach
According to the CRO, every time new layers of security are deployed, attackers quickly adapt and try different approaches, which Cohesity has to do as well. “By working closely with leading security partners such as Mandiant and CrowdStrike – and continuously integrating their threat intelligence feeds – our data security stays current and actionable.”
Ultimately, Cohesity believes that ‘data protection is your last line of defense’: when all else fails, having a valid, clean backup empowers organisations to quickly rebuild after a breach and restore business operations.
Leveraging a global roadmap with local input, the organisation is working closely with partners and customers in APAC to deliver innovation at speed, particularly for verticals such as financial services. “Asia Pacific and Singapore are growth markets for Cohesity, and we’re continuing to invest significantly here to accelerate,” Kit said, adding also, “Partners are the scaling engine for Cohesity and we are reliant on them.”
